China opened the world’s highest railway on Saturday, linking the remote Himalayan region of Tibet with the rest of the country in a symbol of power that President Hu Jintao hailed a ”miracle”.
Hu launched the rail line at the mountain outpost of Golmud in China’s far north-western Qinghai province, with the event held to coincide with the 85th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.
”The project is not only a magnificent feat in China’s history of railway construction, it is also a great miracle for the world,” Hu said.
He then cut a ceremonial red ribbon as the first train with 900 passengers on board departed at 11.05am local time for the 1 142km trip to the Tibetan capital of Lhasa.
Another train departed Lhasa for Golmud moments later amid carefully choreographed dancing at the station by Tibetan and Han Chinese in traditional costumes, with all the events broadcast on state-run television.
The trains, with extra oxygen pumped into the cabins to prevent passengers from suffering altitude sickness, will traverse a mountain pass sitting 5 072 m above sea level as they follow the Tibetan plateau.
At a cost of $4,2-billion, Hu said the train was an important part of China’s historic efforts to modernise the country and further confirmation that the fast-developing nation was one of the world’s great powers.
”This success again shows the hard-working and wise people of China have the courage, confidence and ability to continue to create miracles,” Hu said.
”We also have the courage, confidence and ability to stand among the advanced peoples of the world.”
Aside from coinciding with the 85th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, the launch of the train line followed the completion of the Three Gorges Dam in May and a second manned Chinese space flight in October last year.
However, the train project has drawn enormous controversy from those opposed to China’s rule of Tibet, which began in 1950 when officially atheist Chinese troops marched in to ”liberate” the devoutly Buddhist people of the region.
Critics argue it will allow the national majority Han Chinese to flood in to Tibet, leading to the devastation of the local Tibetan culture, as well as accelerate environmental degradation of the pristine region.
”China’s Tibet railway has been engineered to destroy the very fabric of Tibetan identity,” Lhadon Tethong, an exiled Tibetan and executive director of Students for a Free Tibet, said on Friday.
”China plans to use the railway to transport Chinese migrants directly into the heart of Tibet in order to overwhelm the Tibetan population and tighten its stranglehold over our people.”
Previously, Han Chinese could only get to Tibet on slow, uncomfortable bus rides or on relatively expensive flights. Now, people can travel for 48 hours from Beijing to Lhasa on a train for under $50.
Tibetan rights groups called upon all Tibetans in exile to wear black armbands on Saturday to symbolise a nation in mourning, and to demonstrate in front of Chinese embassies and consulates around the world.
Tibet’s most-revered spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, who fled in 1959 amid a failed Tibetan uprising to establish a government-in-exile in the Indian hill station of Dharamsala, has been careful not to antagonise the Chinese over the train.
”If there is no political motivation and no hidden political agenda, the railway will be good for Tibet. This is why his holiness the Dalai Lama has declared his support for the project,” his spokesperson Thupten Samphel said.
”But if it brings environmental damage to Tibet, if there are more Chinese colonists, then it will have a disastrous effect on the life of Tibetans in Tibet.” — AFP
